We Can’t Be Heroes

Season four of Mutant XHeroes begins tonight. I am on the edge of my pants (of indifference).

Everything good about this show has already been covered in the pages of various X-men comics over the last 40 years. Everything bad too.

Can you blame them, though? Comics had a pretty big head start. There are, after all, only so many powers the human mind can conjure up.1 That being said, the following is a ridiculous and non-comprehensive list of X-Men characters that have appeared on this show:

Wolverine

Havok

Iceman

Chamber

Kitty Pride

Electro (Spider-Man, but close enough.)

Echo

Quicksilver

Professor X

Puppet Master

Mystique

Bishop

Colossus

Pyro

Rogue

Beast (with a dash of Spider-Man/Brundlefly)

Magneto

Banshee

Luke Cage

Proteus

Storm

Nightcrawler

The Great Machine (Not technically an X-man, or even a Marvel character, so at least they’re broadening their pilfering horizons.)

It’s not just characters either, plots and arcs have of course been borrowed from generously. So much so, in fact that in just three abbreviated years, not to mention a slew of web series and graphic novels, the show has pretty much run out of things to steal from the Marvel universe. Hopefully this will prove to be a good thing. Hopefully this will now force the show’s writers to innovate. If I wanted comics I could just read comics. Give me something that only works on my TV, or more realistically, my computer.

The show is not all bad. Exhibit A:

So this character, Spock Sylar, the big bad from season one, can suck out other people’s powers directly from their brains. Conveniently, the first power he gobbled down was telekenesis, so all he has to do now is point a finger, slice off the top of your head and drink….your…brainshake. Drink it up!

Now, Wolverine Claire has the ability to regenerate. She is, by all accounts, immortal. You can see how that would be a highly coveted power to absorb. In fact, that’s something the show has been building towards since the beginning. If Sylar ever gets her power he will become unstoppable.

Despite my language earlier, it’s never been clear exactly what he does with the brains once he scoops them out. Technically, Sylar’s power is the ability to take a complex mechanism apart and intuit how it works. His sin and his blessing is curiosity. Fair enough. Somehow though, understanding how a power works translates to him gaining that power permanently. Fair enough. But what exactly does he have to do to understand a power?

Such is my faith in Bryan Fuller, creator of three fantastic, fantastical and increasingly morbid television shows, namely Wonderland, Dead Like Me, and Pushing Daisies, that I still hold out hope. Fuller was around in the beginning, when the show was at its best, and left to work on Pushing Daisies, right around when the quality started to dip. He returned at the end of last season, because America wasn’t ready for talking corpses played for laughs. Or should I say such was my faith since I think he has now left the show yet again?

We’ll see tonight if the show can ever live up to its potential and its esteemed predecessors:

For now though, let’s just hope season four isn’t building up to a climactic showdown between the heroes and Mojo in the Danger Room, which is now on the moon, while the Shi’ar empire watches and their leader, Brett Ratner, masturbates onto a pile of burning money. Oh and Cylons Skrulls. Actually, I wouldn’t mind some Cylon action. Ah, the soft bigotry of mutated expectations.